In FP Tech Desk’s Startup Roundup series, we take a look at Canadian startup news from the past week.

Hyperdrive’s first demo day as KW celebrates “Techtoberfest”

Last Friday I took a trip to KW to visit the Communitech headquarters in the Tannery building in Kitchener, Ont. Timed to coincide with “Techtoberfest” (which was timed to coincide with the area’s well known Oktoberfest) was the Hyperdrive accelerator’s first demo day. Six early-stage companies made short pitches to an audience of investors, including: Will Pwn 4 Food, Coachd, BuildCircle, Simplicity VMS, Organimi and Incentivibe.

After the Hyperdrive presentation, companies in Communitech’s venture services group also made pitches. Two of those companies, Vidyard and BufferBox, are graduates of the Y Combinator program in Silicon Valley, but their founders spoke about why they’re still based in Southern Ontario. I had spoken with Mike McCauley of BufferBox earlier about those reasons for this feature on the Waterloo Region.

Vidyard’s Michael Litt also mentioned that he recently moved his company into a house just blocks away from the Tannery building and painted it “Vidyard green.” It’s not the first time he’s been involved in founding a mini tech hub, as FP Tech Desk’s Matt Hartley wrote about in this story on Mr. Litt’s former stomping grounds, Batavia House.

That bungalow also happened to be the one-time home of Eric Migicovsky, founder of the company now known as Pebble Technology that raised more than $10-million on Kickstarter to build smartphone-connected watches. Mr. Migicovsky was back in town for the day and gave a presentation later in the afternoon on why he ended up using the crowdfunding site to get his project off the ground and some of the challenges he’s encountered in getting the watches made after backers placed pre-orders for about 85,000 watches through the site.

Vancouver’s QuickMobile lands $3.3M funding round

QuickMobile, the Vancouver-based provider of mobile apps for corporate meetings and events, raised $3.3-milion in a funding round led by BDC IT Venture fund, the company said Tuesday.

The startup raised $2.6-million last year, including a $2.3-million infusion of debt and equity from angel investors in August 2011.

The company, which just added its 100th employee, is going after Fortune 500 companies as a target market and expanding its network of resellers and referral partners.

Latest batch of C100 48 Hours in the Valley startups named

This Monday, the C100, a group of influential Canadians now living in Silicon Valley, revealed the list of 23 early-stage companies picked to join them in California in November for two days of networking and mentorship.

I spoke with Faizal Karmali, one of the co-founders of Toronto-based Quinzee, about getting accepted into the program and he called it “The biggest win for us so far.”

Mr. Karmali and his business partner Lee Bremer launched their customer engagement platform that lets utility users with smart meters in their homes monitor their day-to-day energy consumption in August.

The pair have bootstrapped their business so far and have been looking for backers to give them the ability to spend some money on bringing development of their software in-house and to put together a sales team that really understands how to sell enterprise software to the utility world.

They’ll be getting some coaching from the C100 before their trip to the Valley on how to make effective one-on-one pitches to investors and potential strategic partners.

The ICTC said during the course of this year, Canadian smartphone users will surpass 13 million, up from 9.1 million in 2011. That’s a significant chunk — about 37% — of our population of about 35 million and definitely more than the worldwide average. Strategy Analytics reported Wednesday that the number of global smartphone users in the third quarter of the year exceeded 1 billion, which is about 14% of the approximately 7 billion people on the planet.

Shopify’s billion-dollar milestone

Last week Shopify Inc. announced that merchants that sell their goods through online stores using its platform have moved more than $1-billion worth of products since it launched.

The Ottawa startup originally started in 2004 in an attempt to build a snowboard shop online but after developing its own software to run the site, the team reinvented the business in 2005 as a software as a service company. As of its update last week, it has more than 35,000 stores using its technology to power their e-commerce sites.

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